The ugliest face of the war in Ukraine comes to us live from the destroyed Kakhovka dam, with hundreds of thousands of hectares flooded, towns and cities evicted, crops destroyed and the desperate silence of the displaced. Once again, once a war has started, the contenders inevitably use the weapons at their disposal.
We have no independent information. The truth of the facts will be known later and will be told by the victors. But given the atrocities carried out by Putin since February 2022, invading a neighboring country without just cause, cities razed, hospitals bombed and hundreds of Ukrainian children transferred to Russia, it is reasonable to conclude that the blowing up of the dam is a premeditated action by those who plan the war from the Kremlin. "Woe to that leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were when it started." These are the words of Chancellor Bismarck, an expert in the three wars he won, the last of which he held at the Palace of Versailles in Paris, where he proclaimed German unity in 1870.
What does the Europe of progress and science, the cradle of freedoms, have to be the scene of the great massacres in recent centuries? Ukraine and Poland have been the two countries that have suffered the greatest calamities as a consequence of the warmongering caused by the powers of each moment. The historian François Furet talks about how Stalin exterminated millions of people in the name of the fight against the bourgeoisie and Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews in the name of the purity of the Aryan race. There is a mystery of evil, he concludes, in the dynamics of the political ideas that despised freedom in the last century.
Putin is not going to win this war, as inhuman and cruel as all of them. And Ukraine, neither. But Russia must know that staying in occupied territory indefinitely cannot be considered a victory but a failure. Americans have experienced it in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be nice if the European far left and far right would say loud and clear Putin hands off Ukraine. It is the cause of this humanitarian catastrophe.
